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Paul slept with men. Had always wanted to, according to the therapist we saw together. Having sublimated that desire all his life, he now wanted to sleep with more of them. Men, that is. Not therapists.
So, he made that decision, And in the 11th year of our marriage, he found the voice to speak it to me. Despite all our previous talk of open marriage, free reign to do as we (mainly I) wished in it, this was not welcome news. I don’t know what I expected, once he began leaving books about bi-sexuality and Virginia Woolf around home, but I was finally dismayed to discover – surprised, even – that Paul had desires of his own and a strong need to fulfill them.
To test my earlier suspicions, for his birthday July 1982, I bought him a beautiful coffee table book of Helmut Newton’s female nudes. He never opened it, except to read the loving, slightly racy dedication I wrote inside the front cover. He’d lost his interest, if he ever had one, in looking at naked ladies, but, I didn’t expect him to lose interest in looking at my particular version of one because our sex life had always been so satisfying. For me. I’ d never given a thought to how it might have been for him.) up until the very day he left, and it was, as always, extremely good, but he wasn’t really in the bed with me. I saw that finally. I was making love for both of us – how long had I actually been doing that? – and mechanically, it was as effective as always because need is a powerful aphrodisiac . I kept thinking If our sex is this easy, how can he leave?. As I look back on it, though, he was already gone. Probably hoping to get that final sex with me over with so he could get to some guy he truly wanted. He always did have trouble saying no to me. Generous Paul. Poor blind me.

So, after gallons of tears, countless bouts of yelling and several wine glasses thrown (by me, some with wine still in them), we had to separate. Even I knew it, despite my weird and sticky need to keep him home.
And so we did. We even named it: our separation. Together, we decided to live apart. We separated together. I clung to the belief that it was a joint decision. Something we agreed on. But I never really accepted it.
He went to sleep on famous playwrights’ sofas, and I got to discover how to get up in the morning when all I wanted to do was dive deep down into the earth beneath the bed. I discovered the real meaning of the word “depression.”
Paul felt as guilty as he felt glad to be free,so I had tons of fun using his guilt to make us both even more miserable. I’d make him feel lousy, then he’ he’d make me feel worse for making him feel lousy. Round and we went. Every hour of the day and night. On the phone, in a variety of public places. I should have bought stock in Kleenex because I used enough to keep that company afloat.
He seemed to hate hurting me, so I made sure he knew just how much he was hurting me. That wasn’t hard to do at all because he read me like a first grade primer.
We played our endless games with each other and, in so doing, became the living, breathing definition of co-dependent love. We were a closed self-sufficient system, knowing exactly which buttons to push for maximum pain and quickest relief from it. It was our way of remaining in each others’ lives and in this emotional, strangely loving way, we held on. It took us what seemed like forever pry to our fingers off the marriage we’d both built. Paul, despite being the one to leave, needed to hold onto me as well, and so we spent several years in that place between being married and not.
The agonies it brought me yielded many hours in therapy and hundreds of pages of bad poetry, Such bad poetry, I now want to write a bad poem about how bad all that bad poetry made me feel on re-reading it. Once I’d discovered the landscape of depression, I discovered the muddy shores of wallowing as well. And , like a pig in the proverbial shit, I enjoyed all that anger and endless sadness . Why else would I have bathed in it for so long?
Reasons to get up in the morning: to hate Paul, yet stay as close to him as possible; to feel scared of being alone, yet relish each solitudinous night I went home after a performance and light candles in the dark , write more bad poems and eat ice cream; sitting down to lunch with each of Paul’s new boyfriends to show how okay I was with it all and wanting to take a Tommy gun out from under my coat to destroy them. I was a walking contradiction, pulsing and oozing the pain of betrayal, yet getting bi- weekly pedicures and facials that Paul insisted on paying for. Lovely to look at, delightful to know, I was a snow globe, all awhirl inside. But it wasn’t pretty. Think snow globe World War II battlefield version, shrapnel flying instead of snowflakes.